I bought my MacBook in mid-2008 with Leopard (10.5.2) pre-installed. On it, I installed (Japanese) Windows XP using BootCamp. I am now up to Snow Leopard (10.6.7) and I can continue to use Windows XP (currently at SP3) with no problems. If I upgrade to Lion, will I still be able to use my existing Windows XP installation? (N.B. If I can't, I shan't upgrade.)

2 Answers
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This may have been a problem during the Lion install when it resizes the partitions on the drive, it may have screwed up the XP partition when installing the Recovery Partition...this should only be a problem if your drive is almost full...I have a setup similar to yours (SL on one partition, and XP on the other under Bootcamp) I had 450GB free...I didn't have any trouble.

Hi, Similar to my comment anove to Michael, this sort of "discussion" should be placed in comments rather than supplied as an "amswer", this is purely to assist those with the same problems in identifying genuine answers, rather than commentary etc. As to your actual reply, there indeed is an issue whereby if you have more than 3 partitions before you upgrade to Lion, and Bootcamp is at number 3 in the list, then when Lion installs and places the recovery partition at the start of the disk, this moves Bootcamp to position 4, from where is is not able to be booted.
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stuffe♦Aug 17 '11 at 13:30

The bootcamp partition is not affected. The only thing Apple did different in Lion is that the bootcamp drivers packaged with Lion installations only work with Windows 7, however, if you already have the Snow Leopard drivers installed on you XP side nothing will change...if you need to install a new bootcamp partition you will need to get the bootcamp drivers from your Snow Leopard DVD.